virtual worlds

Ever wondered just how many users dwell in so-called virtual worlds nowadays? Here’s a quick visual tool developed by UK-based company Kzero: total registered accounts, average user age, and year of creation.

Virtual Worlds user census – (c) Kzero 2009

It’s only a fancy graph, I admit it, and it comes from a market research report. But the point here is that, despite adverse reports, virtual worlds are still in pretty good shape. One would imagine that, after the demise of the 1990s virtual reality craze, and after the mid-2000s half-assed attempt to revamp metaverses, plain non-MMORPG computer-based simulated environments would fall short in attracting new users and end up in the dustbin of history.

Coined in 1984 by William Gibson, the term cyberspace was the buzzword of the 1990s. In those dark ages, way way way before Google maps and geotagging, academic conventional wisdom tended to regard information environments as a space apart, the Other Plane, a habitat of pure information – a “cybernetic space”. Ludicrous, right? Yet, a number of prominent scholars have produced excellent research on the topic, mainly in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, and humanities. So, it was a bit of a surprise when, at the very end of the decade, geographers Martin Dodge & Rob Kitchin, came up with a thought-provoking book called Mapping Cyberspace (2000).